Made-Up Words

I'll never stop

Do you ever become a sudden idiot? Particularly with words? Having just sent off a package at the UPS store, I was in the car with Sean, and muttered something boring but came to a pause when the word I wanted wasn’t there. But in an absentminded way. I distractedly chose “receival,” and then stopped. wait.. what? Sean calmly replied,

“Receipt, uh-huh…” urging me to continue with the story.

But there was no story anymore. This took precedence. Because, still in my stupid* state, when I asked if “receival” was a word and he said he thought not, I felt strong objection to this:

“Why not? Why does ‘retrieve’ get ‘retrieval’ and ‘receive’ not get ‘receival’??”

Could it be argued that “receipt” is too strongly associated with printed proof of purchase, or evidence of occurrence? Like, if I use “receipt” in my original boring story of the person taking what I gave, I’m going to picture something differently entirely. But maybe this is just me. Sean agreed the discrepancy was lexically** strange, and it didn’t come to much in the end. I mean, what can one do. Other than write an essay about it, which seems a given.

But then a few days later, something similar happened. I was listening to a highly intelligent friend of mine via the Marco Polo app and she was talking about the weather where she lives. She said,

“It hasn’t snown here in forever….snown? … SNOWED.”

And I was like, “Ah-HA!”

I loved it so much. There’s “know/known,” why not “snow/snown??” “Snown” is a perfectly acceptable word—nay, a beautiful word. The better word. Now, “snowed” feels like saying “knowed” and I both sound and feel dumb. On the other hand, if we accept “snown,” we might have to allow “snew” as in, “it snew yesterday” and maybe that’s not such a good idea.

TBD on all of this. I won’t give up easily.

that’s right, I did it.

*or genius? you decide.
**ha ha ha.